Tuesday, August 15, 2006

With GarageGames' partnership with Microsoft, an indie could get a jump start on their desired Xbox 360 title:

You might ask, "Torque? Does that mean Torque Game Builder,Torque Game Engine, or Torque Shader Engine?"

The answer is some of each. We are porting key portions of our 2D and 3D technology and tools over to XNA. We already have much of the Torque Game Builder engine, and several components of our 3D technology, including artist-friendly shader support, up and running solidly in Torque X. The working environment will be similar to that of our other Torque products, so if you're familiar with Torque you should have no trouble hitting the ground running with Torque X.

Furthermore, since the entire functionality of Torque Game Builder will be included in Torque X,you can start building your game in Torque Game Builder now, then port it over to Torque X when it's available and use it in conjunction with XNA Game Studio Express to run it on the Xbox 360!

I'd still recommend Torque and it's flavors to friends and family, even though I haven't been wildly thrilled with it's performance on the Mac Mini. I'm relatively sure that shouldn't be a problem on the 360 and it's really a very friendly engine to work with on both the TorqueScript and C++ side of things (TGB at least, I can't speak for the full engine). Plus, the GG crowd is pretty hardcore about making this stuff successful.

On a side note, I dearly wish Apple would follow suit with this concept. Sure, they don't have a fancy game console to promote, but if they made a custom version of XCode just for gamers - perhaps with trial versions of PTK and TGB shoved right in ...